Torvalds' Number Two Quit Linux a Decade Ago and Has Since Then Earned an Honorary Doctorate
Snowdon from the sea
THE night before we moved servers (moving everything to the UK - away from aggressive psychopaths who loathe the Rule of Law) we published a video of Alan Cox, in which he spoke about "Free software". Well, it has been over a decade since he left Linux to focus on other projects (ignore these loaded headlines!) and he also lost his partner around that time.
Well, his wife Telsa Gwynne died in 2015 and he married again in 2020. Gwynne wrote a great essay on what it's like to be married to a Linux hacker, e.g. "It's your mother on the phone--do you want a word?" and "Are you coming to your parents' silver wedding anniversary party? If so, the train is leaving in five minutes."
Her deteriorating health and death seem to have impacted him a lot, based on discussions online (at the time [1, 2]). They had been together for many years and she was likely a key (but hidden) "engine" behind Alan's work on Linux.
The Swansea University page about his honorary doctorate seems to have gone missing/offline, but here he is aged about 47:
On the 31st of October 2014 (i.e. almost exactly one decade ago) he started Fuzix OS. Some people in our IRC network discussed it. The official Web site is alive and well, the latest official builds are dated last summer, and the front page says: "The 32bit binaries that were using a bodged Linux binflt format are now using a.out with some small extensions to handle the relocation maps. This should hopefully now become a stable executable format for the future."
There is also an active Mastodon account, "The Penguin of Evil".
Alan is very active. He did not vanish, he merely moved.
Seeing what Linux has become, it may be interesting to follow Fuzix. Despite his looks, Cox is only about 55, so he has plenty left in him. For those of us who like simpler and leaner systems, Fuzix might be a good fit. Cox isn't limited to hardcore kernel stuff, having also worked on GNOME and X.Org. Unlike Torvalds, he's not shy to use the "F" word (freedom). █